The Travelling Detective: Boxed Set Read online

  Everything here kept reminding her of the skeleton in the tank. Head-Smashed-In could almost be the name for the battered skull she’d seen yesterday. She looked up at the jagged rock face of the cliff. The buffalo tumbling over the edge must have been a sight.

  Back at her vehicle she put on Chevy’s leash to let him outside. He immediately crawled under the vehicle. She shoved his container of water under with him. She could hear him lapping it up while she placed her camera and recorder on the mattress. When he was finished, they continued on their tour.

  Chapter 5

  Ed Bowman picked up the phone and dialled a number. “Hugh? This is Ed. We have another problem out here.”

  “What now?”

  “A skeleton has been found in one of the septic tanks on that place.”

  “A skeleton? What kind of skeleton?”

  “A human one. The police told me not to do any more work there until they say so.” Ed knew Hugh wouldn’t want to hear that.

  “A skeleton? Then the body was put there a long time ago. It has nothing to do with us buying that place.”

  “Well, it might.” At least he wasn’t shouting. Hugh was taking this better than he’d thought.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I got a phone call from someone claiming he belongs to CRAP.”

  “What did he have to say?” There was some annoyance in Hugh’s voice.

  “He said we should have listened to them and not tried to establish the barn in the area.”

  “Are you saying that they put the skeleton there?”

  “He didn’t go that far,” Ed said, remembering the conversation. “But that’s what I think he was implying.”

  “Did you tell the police that it might be a prank?”

  “Yes. They said they still had to investigate the finding.” He braced himself for the outburst, for Hugh to start yelling that they had put up with enough from that group, that they didn’t need any more delays. When that didn’t come, he knew something was wrong. He continued. “And they also asked for a list of the shareholders of the corporation.” Ed knew that the shareholders didn’t want their names given out. Hog barns were not popular.

  “Why?”

  “Because the shareholders are the owners of the land now. The skeleton was found on their property.”

  “Did you give it to them?”

  “No. I said I didn’t have it. They gave me twenty-four hours to get it.”

  “Damn,” Hugh said showing his first real sign of emotion. “That place has caused us more headaches, and maybe all for nothing.” He sighed. “Okay. Frances and I will be there in a couple of days. We’ll contact you and the police when we arrive.”

  Ed slowly hung up the receiver, troubled. What had Hugh meant by his ‘maybe all for nothing’? He’d have to find out as soon as he and Frances got here.

  * * * *

  From the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump parking lot, Elizabeth turned right onto SH 785 again, which was paved for only a short distance. Once she hit gravel the dust churned up behind her and she was temporarily blinded whenever she met an oncoming vehicle. But that didn’t stop her from being awed by the gorgeous greens and yellows of the Porcupine Hills. Every time she crested a hill a new vista awaited her, many of them with the Rockies in the background.

  During the drive she pointed out some of the scenery to an indifferent Chevy. He’d just open one eye at her and then close it again. When she arrived at a stop sign she turned right and drove to the junction with SH 510. She went left and quickly reached the Oldman River Antique Equipment and Threshing Club at Heritage Acres. What a mouthful for a name.

  She stopped to put some money in a donation box at the caretaker’s house. She knew that work done in a lot of these places was by volunteers and any money collected went to pay for restoration costs.

  This time she was able to park in the shade of a tree and she rolled the windows down as far as she dared. She didn’t want Chevy jumping out and getting lost. She patted him on the back and then, slipping the camera chain over her head and checking to make sure she had an extra tape in her pouch with her recorder, she began her tour.

  “The yard that houses the club is huge,” she began recording. “And there are buildings set mainly around the outer edge.”

  Elizabeth had read about and seen pictures of the Crystal Village and that was her first stop because she wanted to see the small buildings that were made from telephone insulators embedded in cement blocks. She was enchanted as she strolled the narrow walkways connecting a miniature church, school, shed, and other buildings and admired the colourful flowers and shrubs that grew in the tiny yards.

  She lifted the tape recorder to her mouth. “It really does look like it is made of crystal.”

  It was constructed in the early 1970s by an eccentric man named Boss Zoeteman. He used over two hundred thousand of the insulators and nine hundred cross arms to build the small-scale village. She didn’t know where he found all those insulators or what gave him the idea to build it, but the result was magical.

  When she left the Crystal Village, Elizabeth noted that there were only a few visitors in the rest of the site but that could be because it was still early in the day. She smiled at a family of five, the children holding tightly to their parent’s hands. She wondered how they had liked the village. The buildings would have been perfect playhouses for them.

  Elizabeth walked by steam engines, a saw mill, and a grain elevator then discovered that the Quonsets were full of old farming equipment. A point of interest, she recorded, was the restored 1917 Doukhobor barn, which housed carriages and wagons, including an 1881 Amish town wagon. She could have spent hours here reading the informative descriptions about the history and uses of each piece, and who had restored it.

  “If you want to be transported back in time,” she said into her recorder. “Then this is the place to visit.”

  * * * *

  Dick Pearson sat with his head in his hands at his kitchen table. An empty coffee cup was in front of him. It was long past time to be going to work—usually, he was driving into his first customer’s yard by eight. But this morning when he’d risen, the urge for a drink had taken possession of him again. He regretted his rash decision to pour the rye down the drain the night before.

  Dick hadn’t slept well. The vision of the leg bone propped in the corner of the septic tank kept nagging at him. Then the memory of the rest of the afternoon and evening followed.

  While the police assembled the equipment they needed to complete the cleaning of the first tank, Hildebrandt had Dick move to the other tank to suck it out slowly while he watched for bones. When nothing had been found there, he’d gone with the officers to the police station where he was asked some questions. He’d been doubly uncomfortable, first with the questioning and second with sitting there in his work clothes.

  The feeling that he’d experienced at the septic tank was intensifying. He just knew his life was about to change. The events of the evening before had drained him of any energy to go to work. He’d waited years for an opportunity to try to win Peggy back and he had been taking it slow. Ever since Harry left, he’d been there as a friend for her. He’d helped her move off the acreage. He’d cleaned up the mobile home when her renters left it dirty. He’d found a buyer for it when she wanted to sell it.

  He’d had patience. Nine years of patience. It had been paying off too; they’d begun dating a year ago. But whenever he’d mentioned moving in together or even getting married she’d been reluctant. And he could understand that. Until a few weeks ago, she’d still considered herself married.

  Then, just before the offer on her acreage, she’d received the documents that had declared her long lost husband legally dead. It was the only way she would have been able to sell the property, as his name was on the title. To celebrate, he’d suggested a cruise. She had accepted and they had spent time trying to decide where to go. They’d settled on an Alaskan cruise and were going to book it next w
eek. He’d also planned on asking her to marry him while on the ship.

  And now this ... the bones ... someone’s skeleton found in Peggy’s septic tank. They could be anyone’s bones, he reminded himself. Just because no one has heard from either Harry or Julia since they left doesn’t mean the skeleton was one of them.

  But he couldn’t get his mind off it being Harry in the tank. On the bright side, assuming there was such a thing, if it was Harry, he would never have to worry about him coming back into Peggy’s life. If it wasn’t, then he was sure Harry was involved somehow and all Harry’s dirty laundry would be brought out into the open again, would probably be broadcast across the nation.

  Dick wished, for the umpteenth time, that Arnie hadn’t come along yesterday when he did. If he had been able to hide the bones, everyone’s lives would continue as they had for the past nine years. Just a few minutes more was all he had needed.

  Dick stood and reached for his empty coffee cup. He refilled it and made himself some toast. For a few days more, he still had a job to do, so he’d better get to it.

  * * * *

  Just after turning back onto SH 510, Elizabeth reached the Oldman River Dam where she found a place to stop.

  “You are such a good dog just lying quietly while I do my research,” she said to Chevy before letting him out for a run. While he made a circuit of the chain-link fence overlooking the spillway of the dam, she walked over to it and looked down. What a long way to the river below. She gave him his water and another treat before they climbed back into the vehicle.

  Shortly after their stop, she arrived at the Crowsnest Highway again or Highway 3 as many maps showed it. She turned right and when she reached the junction with Highway 6, swung left. She went down the hill into the main part of Pincher Creek.

  She found Bridge Avenue and drove on it to the Pincher Creek and District Museum and tourist information centre housed in a large log building. She’d read that this 493 square metre log building was designed to last 200 years. It was constructed mainly by volunteers, and local businesses and private citizens had donated the logs, floor tiles, doors and roof shakes. It sure showed what a community, working together, could do.

  She wandered through the gift shop and looked at the displays of carvings then went out a doorway and found herself at the Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village. She explored a blacksmith shop full of tools, and a police outpost with its display of historical North West Mounted Police uniforms.

  Elizabeth knew that there were a number of stories as to how this small town on the wide expanse of the southern Alberta prairie received its name. It seems that there were some prospectors who went through the area years before a North West Mounted Police barracks was set up in the late 1870s. These gold seekers lost a pair of pincers (used to shoe horses) beside a creek. In one story, one of them goes back to get the tool, in another the men get lost and only the pincers are left to show anyone had been there, and in a third a North West Mounted Police officer finds the pincers.

  She hadn’t been able to find out how or why or when the name was changed from pincer to Pincher. Which was too bad because she liked adding these kinds of tidbits to her stories.

  Before she left town she bought a copy of the local paper, the Pincher Creek Echo. The history spots, vignettes, anecdotes, advertisements for upcoming events and general news in the local papers usually gave her some more information about what was happening in the area she was visiting.

  * * * *

  Brian Sinclair took the letter out of its envelope and held it in his hand. He knew what it said; he’d read it countless times in the three months since it had arrived. But he opened it and read it again.

  My Dearest Son,

  I’m afraid I have some bad news. I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but I think it’s easiest to just say it. I have ovarian cancer and the doctors tell me I don’t have much time left. Since I can do little else I’ve been spending my days thinking about my life and what I would change in it. Dying has made me realize a lot of things and to have deprived you all these years of what I’m about to tell you was wrong. I just want you to know that I did it out of fear that you would be further hurt if you ever found your father and he wasn’t the man you were expecting. First of all, I am not just some woman who took you in. I am your aunt. Your father is my half-brother. We have different mothers but the same father. Your grandmother became pregnant with him out of wedlock. She left him with his father (also my father), the man you called Grandpa, and moved out west with her parents. When your father was in his mid-thirties, he married and had you. Your mother died when you were two years old and he went a little strange. That was when our father told him where his mother was. In what seems to be a family trait he left you with me while he went looking for her. I don’t know what happened to him. He never returned but about a year after he left, I began receiving money in the mail. There were no letters included, but the post office mark on the envelope was always Fort Macleod, Alberta. I assumed the money was from him to help with your upbringing. On your twenty-first birthday the money stopped. You’d already been gone two years by then. I put the money from those two years into an account for you hoping to be able to give it to you when you came for a visit. Since you never did I’ve enclosed a cheque for it. Your grandmother’s name is Harriet Douglas. I don’t know if she married and if she did what her married name would be. And you know your father’s name is Allen Sinclair, although he could have changed it. I haven’t heard anything since the cheques stopped. Maybe they are still in the Fort Macleod area and if you find one you will find the other. I have to let you know that I always loved you like a son and I miss you terribly. I understand why you never come back to see me. I am just glad you have been thoughtful enough to send me Christmas cards every year. Thank you for writing your little notes in them. I have kept every one. You don’t know how many times I have been tempted to find your phone number and call you just to hear your voice, but I knew if you wanted to talk to me you would call. I am sorry for not telling you this sooner. We might have had some wonderful years, if I had.

  Betty

  He folded the letter. It was strange to think that Fort Macleod was one of the small towns he’d spent time in during the years he’d been looking for his father. Since receiving the letter three months ago he’d often wondered if he’d passed his father on the street or even chatted with him while standing in a grocery line.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number of the hospital where she was now staying. He’d been calling her once a week since the letter came. He hadn’t forgiven her for not telling him, but he couldn’t let her die without speaking with her. After all, he’d loved her as a mother for ten years. They’d had some long conversations during the phone calls and his anger towards her had lessened a great deal.

  As he listened to the dial tone, he remembered the day he’d found out about his parents. He had been twelve and was walking home from school with a friend named Donnie, when Donnie suddenly blurted out that Brian’s Mom and Dad were not his real parents.

  He’d been stunned by the words and then had defiantly said yes they were. When Donnie kept insisting they weren’t Brian had begun yelling at him calling him a liar. Donnie wouldn’t quit saying the words so Brian had turned and run home. When he arrived he asked if what his friend had said was true and he knew immediately that it was when Betty said quietly. “We need to have a talk.”

  Her first words were that she had always considered him her son. She’d also explained that his father went looking for his own mother who had left the area with her family after he was born. They’d moved west to go farming. Before leaving, his father put Brian in her care. When he asked his father’s name, she told him it was Allen Sinclair. She added that his own real name was Brian Sinclair, not the name he was known under. When he’d been left with her, she’d renamed him so he would feel more like her own child.

  From that day on he’d called them Betty and Roger. His anger had g
rown as he had grown because they wouldn’t give him answers to the questions that burned inside him. His grandfather had died and Betty had no other siblings, and he had too much pride to ask his now former friend, Donnie, if he could find out from the person who had told him. The woman he’d called grandmother was too old to remember much. She had told him that Betty and his father were half brother and sister. He’d never told Betty he knew that much.

  In high school he’d spent his time planning his trip west to find his father. He wanted to change his name to his legal one but he’d been too young for that. When he was old enough, he’d found a job and always had one throughout high school. He saved his money and the day after he graduated, he left without saying goodbye. He had just turned nineteen. He headed west and spent a few years working in small towns on the prairies. At each place he looked Sinclair up in the telephone book and sought out men with that name. He watched them, looking for something familiar, a walk, a voice, a movement. He kept the name he’d gone under through school. He didn’t want to give himself away to his father until he knew him a little. But he had no success and had finally decided his father must have changed his name and in that case, there was little chance he would find him.

  It wasn’t until he’d married that he wrote Betty a letter including his return address in Victoria, BC. He did say that they didn’t have any room for visitors and she had understood the message because when she wrote back she never said she wanted to come to see him. Since then, he’d sent Christmas cards with short letters in them and received the same from her. Roger had died five years ago.